With the movement in Storage Area Networks (SANs) to Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and the acceptance of 10 Gigabit (Gb) Ethernet standard, a lossless methodology must be utilized to support the FCoE. Priority-based flow control is intended to eliminate frame loss due to congestion resulting from head of line blocking. Current methodologies. i.e., the 802.3x mechanism and extensions of this mechanism, for priority flow control (PFC) attempt to ensure zero loss under congestion in Data Center Bridging Networks and specify traffic classes that may be paused. These methodologies tend to stop other types of data traffic when storage needs more bandwidth. In addition, a buffer overflow situation may occur due to the partially blocking nature of the current architecture where a traffic scheduler managing traffic from multiple priority queues as the traffic scheduler blocks the head of the line carrying all priorities.
It is in this context that embodiments arise.